Kids left in Africa craved word of Yao and home

Kids feared they wouldn't make it homeWoman's version of how they landed in Nigeria in doubt

Published 5:30 am, Wednesday, August 18, 2004

The seven Houston children reportedly abandoned in Nigeria by their adoptive mother had been telling people their story, but no one believed them until a visiting missionary found them and helped bring them home.

The woman told CPS officials in March that she had left the children with her mother in Houston while she underwent cancer treatment in Shreveport, La.

In truth, she had taken the children last October to Nigeria, where a relative of her fiance lived, and enrolled them in school, said Estella Olguin, Harris County CPS spokeswoman. About a month later, she returned to Houston. This April she went to Iraq as a civilian food-service worker.

Her children ended up in an orphanage after their tuition money stopped and the relative apparently deserted them at a home.

"Those are just some of the things we now know that she hasn't been honest to us about," Olguin said. "So it's hard for us to know what she is being honest about. Did she really send them to Nigeria so they could go to school? Did she send them there with the intention of never coming back? We just don't know."

The Chronicle is not naming the woman because she has not been charged with a crime. Attempts to speak with her by telephone and at a Houston address where she was thought to live were unsuccessful Tuesday.

The three boys and four teenage girls ranging in age from 8 to 16 returned to Houston on Friday after Warren Beemer, a youth pastor from a San Antonio, church found them in the orphanage.

Dreaming of Houston

The children told Beemer they had despaired of ever getting home to Houston. They had told the story of being abandoned by their adoptive mother so many times to so many other other people, he said.

Beemer took their photographs and had them write their names on notepads.

"I promised them they would be going home," he said in a telephone interview from his church Tuesday. "I said, 'Guys, in no uncertain terms, you will be going home.' "

Olguin said Tuesday that the Harris County CPS was concentrating on getting medical and psychological care for the children and getting them enrolled in school.

Upon their return to Houston, three of the children were treated for malaria at a local hospital and released.

Since then, the three boys have been placed in one foster home and the girls placed in another.

Stories don't match

Olguin said the adoptive mother told CPS workers she had taken the children to Nigeria to attend a boarding school suggested by her fiance. The children told CPS they never stayed at a boarding school, but lived in a shack while going to school.

The mother said she had called the children two or three times a week while they were living in Nigeria, Olguin said. The kids told caseworkers she only called once, Feb. 14.

"This is someone who is not being honest with everything she is telling us, so there is a lot of investigative work to do," Olguin said.

The woman had been receiving $512 a month from CPS for each of her seven adopted children because, as minority siblings wishing to stay together, they were considered to have special needs that made them hard to adopt.

Four of the children were adopted from the Houston CPS in 1996, while three were adopted from the Dallas CPS in 2001.

Houston CPS cut off funds to the woman in March when they learned the children were not living with her.

Dallas CPS spokeswoman Marissa Gonzales said the state continued to pay her for the three children adopted in Dallas. She said she did not know why.

"We are still looking through a lot of our documents right now," she said.

The woman, who divorced in 1990, was approved for the adoptions after passing home studies conducted by Spaulding for Children, a nonprofit child welfare agency in Houston, Olguin said.

Spaulding spokeswoman Kirstin Joel would not comment on the case, citing confidentiality rules.

Joel, however, said the agency always does a complete home evaluation and supervises the adopting family's visitations with the children before they are placed in the home. Once in the home, she said, the agency continues to monitor the family for a minimum of six months before the adoption can be formalized.

The agency does not stay involved after the adoption is complete.

'No magic number'

Joel and Olguin said it is not out of the ordinary to place as many as seven children with a single parent who is seeking to adopt them.

"There is no magic number of who can handle what," Joel said. "It's very much an individual decision made on the part of the professionals involved, Child Protective Services and the families involved and what kind of support structure they have."

The woman's Houston neighbors said the adoptive mother had been living at a boarding house for a least a year in their neighborhood. They said she drove a late-model Mercedes-Benz.

Beemer said he hopes to reunite with the children soon. He hasn't contacted CPS officials about that, but said once the children adjust to their new lives, he will try to set up a meeting.

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